That meets my definition of “frozen”; the implication is that doing a URPMI update from Cooker now will get you a copy of Mandriva 2006. The steps to follow (from, say, 10.1 or 10.2/LE2005) are:
urpmi.removemedia -a [removes all URPMI sources, but you can be more selective]
urpmi.addmedia --distrib rsync://rsync.planetmirror.com/mandrake-devel/cooker/i586/
urpmi --auto-select
If you don’t want to smash your Internet link flat during the upgrade (typically several hours for a megabit link depending on what you’ve got installed), add an option like “--limit-rate 40k”. URPMI will update itself and all of its dependencies (RPM, glibc etc), then restart itself and do the rest.
On a reasonably full 10.2/LE2005 system, it’s likely that there will be somewhere between two and a dozen dependencies that don’t self-untangle, and it’s also likely that most or all of these will self-untangle if you simply re-run the last URPMI command a couple of times.
While you can do this on a running server or workstation (try that in “DLL hell”!), you need to be aware that subsystems with complex dependencies may be broken for several hours at a time while the upgrade is underway. For example, if you have a web app which relies upon the ImageMagick functions as exposed by PHP, the app is likely to be broken for a short time between the updating of your webserver proper, and the updating of PHP, then again for a long time (maybe half the update) between when PHP gets updated, and when the corresponding ImageMagick libraries arrive.
KDE is also not fond of working well with disparate versions of DCOP etc; the symptoms for this include new applications and new copies of applications (e.g. new windows/tabs/plugins) silently failing to start; a partial solution is logout/login to restart the assorted KDE subsystems (which will interrupt the upgrade if you’re running it from within your GUI session — so plan ahead and run it from a console instead).
Remember to flip your URPMI sources from “devel” to “official” then that appears in the mirrors. You can add an update source right now if you life, as the mirrors already have it.
A nice addition is the Penguin Liberation Front stuff, basically things like codecs which Mandriva either can’t take the risk of shipping on their Free media, or which include some non-Free components. You can add these like so:
urpmi.addmedia plf-free ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/plf/mandrake/free/2006/ with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia plf-non-free ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/plf/mandrake/non-free/2006/ with hdlist.cz
Mandriva 2006 includes OpenOffice 1.1.5, KDE 3.4.2, GNOME 2.10.2, Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 (with patches), KOffice 1.4.1, AbiWord 2.3.99, GNumeric 1.4.3, PostgreSQL 8.0.3, MySQL 4.1.12, Apache 2.0.54 (plus 100 modules on top of the base collection), PHP 5.0.4 (and a long lineup of extensions: ming, radius, smbauth, exif, clamav and roughly 100 more, plus a good healping of Pear), WINE 20050725 (plus patches), kernel 2.6.12 (plus patches including the MPPE stuff, UML, Win4Lin-enabled alternates, and a couple of XboX options), yadda yadda for 11,483 packages (plus another 803 from PLF).
The Terrifying Penguin Of Doom is pretty much gone. There are some new and competently done themes, improved and extra Control Center modules, and practically all of the Mandriva-specific tools seem to have grown new abilities. In short, no big shocks for someone who’s updated their Mandrake/Mandriva installation before. May the flaws be with you!
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